Maybe the people you are developing these tools for are
command line phoebes!

Ah, yes. We're on the same page. I actually did do a web interface, hoping that would solve the problem. No luck. I work in a unix house, and one of my end non-users is total command-line guy. He won't use aliases, command-completion, or shell prompts. I've tried to show him shortcuts ("You know, you could just use the alias 'll' for 'ls -lA'. It's already set up for you in your .tcshrc file."), and he won't do it. Even after demonstrating how it will make their jobs easier, nobody wants to play.